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Coming as the re-activated Stephen King machine was continuing to produce adaptations, quality be damned, the original film felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Featuring a 1970s small town setting, teenage actors, gifted youths and gnarly neighbourhood villain, it was nearly parody and, similar to the poorest his literary works, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.

Curiously the call came from inside the family home, as it was inspired by a compact narrative from the author's offspring, expanded into a film that was a unexpected blockbuster. It was the story of the Grabber, a cruel slayer of children who would enjoy extending their fatal ceremony. While assault was not referenced, there was something clearly non-heteronormative about the villain and the historical touchpoints/moral panics he was clearly supposed to refer to, emphasized by Ethan Hawke playing him with a distinctly flamboyant manner. But the film was too opaque to ever really admit that and even aside from that tension, it was overly complicated and too high on its exhaustingly grubby nastiness to work as anything beyond an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.

The Sequel's Arrival In the Middle of Filmmaking Difficulties

The next chapter comes as previous scary movie successes the production company are in urgent requirement for success. Recently they've faced challenges to make any film profitable, from their werewolf film to The Woman in the Yard to Drop to the utter financial disappointment of M3gan 2.0, and so a great deal rides on whether the sequel can prove whether a brief narrative can become a film that can create a series. However, there's an issue …

Paranormal Shift

The initial movie finished with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) defeating the antagonist, helped and guided by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This situation has required director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to move the franchise and its villain in a different direction, transforming a human antagonist into a paranormal entity, a direction that guides them through Nightmare on Elm Street with an ability to cross back into reality enabled through nightmares. But unlike Freddy Krueger, the villain is clearly unimaginative and entirely devoid of humour. The facial covering continues to be successfully disturbing but the movie has difficulty to make him as scary as he momentarily appeared in the initial film, trapped by complicated and frequently unclear regulations.

Snowy Religious Environment

The protagonist and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) face him once more while trapped by snow at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the sequel also nodding in the direction of Jason Voorhees the Friday the 13th antagonist. The female lead is led there by a vision of her late mother and what might be their late tormenter’s first victims while the brother, still attempting to process his anger and newfound ability to fight back, is tracking to defend her. The script is excessively awkward in its contrived scene-setting, inelegantly demanding to get the siblings stranded at a location that will additionally provide to background information for protagonist and antagonist, filling in details we didn't actually require or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more strategic decision to push the movie towards the comparable faith-based viewers that transformed the Conjuring movies into huge successes, the director includes a spiritual aspect, with virtue now more directly linked with the divine and paradise while evil symbolizes Satan and damnation, belief the supreme tool against a monster like this.

Overcomplicated Story

The result of these decisions is continued over-burden a franchise that was previously nearly collapsing, adding unnecessary complications to what ought to be a simple Friday night engine. Regularly I noticed excessively engaged in questioning about the hows and whys of what could or couldn’t happen to become truly immersed. It’s a low-lift effort for Hawke, whose face we never really see but he does have real screen magnetism that’s mostly missing elsewhere in the ensemble. The location is at times remarkably immersive but the bulk of the persistently unfrightening scenes are marred by a grainy 8mm texture to differentiate asleep and awake, an ineffective stylistic choice that seems excessively meta and designed to reflect the horrifying unpredictability of experiencing a real bad dream.

Unconvincing Franchise Argument

Lasting approximately two hours, the sequel, comparable to earlier failures, is a needlessly long and extremely unpersuasive case for the creation of a new franchise. When it calls again, I advise letting it go to voicemail.

• Black Phone 2 is out in Australia's movie houses on the sixteenth of October and in America and Britain on October 17